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But that's only the beginning. Recently I've run across Essential Monastic Wisdom: Writings on the Contemplative Life (HarperSanFrancisco), by Hugh Feiss, OSB; A Monastic Year: Reflections from a Monastery (Servant), by Brother Victor-Antoine d'Avila-Latourette; and Benedict's Way: An Ancient Monk's Insights for a Balanced Life (Loyola, 2000), by journalist Lonni Collins Pratt and Benedictine Daniel Holman—not to mention the many new editions of ancient monastic rules and teachings, such as the 1998 Vintage Books edition of The Rule of Saint Benedict.

And on it goes. The curiosity, I think, can be boiled down to Paul Wilkes's simple declarative sentence toward the beginning of his book: "I wanted to find out how monks experience God." The assumption, of course, is that monks, especially prayer warriors like the Trappists, have inside knowledge about this experience and that if we could just spend some time with them, we too would learn how to enjoy a greater experience of God.

It was this perennial hope that drove me to and through David Perata's The Orchards of Perseverance: Conversations with Trappist Monks About God, Their Lives, and the World. Reading Perata was the next best thing to being there; as the introduction explains, "This book is about men called by God, about the way they perceived their God calling them, and about their responses to their divine call."

Perata has for years been a regular visitor to New Clairvaux in Vina, California (just north of California State University at Chico, once rated by Playboy magazine the most party-friendly school in the nation). He has become good friends with many of the Trappists there, and has recorded a number of conversations with them to prepare articles about their life. With the approval of Abbot Thomas Davis, he transcribed and edited these interviews into chapter-length monologues for publication. The result is this book.

Perata is no objective sociologist here, and does not pretend to be one. He considers these men members of his extended family, and he's obviously in awe of their spirituality. In some ways, the book is his family album, and it includes a number of photographs of interest only to those who are part of the family (e.g., the Refectory in 1956 and then today; monks hamming it up for the camera, and so on). He is enamored with the exclamation point and the cliche ("It was a truly magical experience!"), but he does have sense enough to get out of the way after three introductory chapters and let the monks speak for themselves.

The life of these monks begins with a call—sometimes even, in rare instances, a clearly supernatural call. For Brother Francis, who has been at New Clairvaux since 1970, it was a "locution," an audible divine or angelic voice that came to him repeatedly, once when backing out of a driveway: "Someday you're going to be a monk."

For most, however, it was a more mundane process, perhaps beginning with the reading of a book, like Merton's history of the Cistercian and Trappist orders, Waters of Shiloe. That was the case for Father Paul Mark, though it was hardly clear at the time: "I can see today with perspective that it was at that time when I read the book, I just felt or knew … that I had received my vocation. … I know what I was looking for in my heart."

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